September 30, 2006: Massacre. September 29, 1960: Tenzin Gyatsu’s prayer.

   

   

May I become at all times, both now and forever
A protector for those without protection
A guide for those have lost their way
A ship for those with oceans to cross
A bridge for those with rivers to cross
A sanctuary for those in danger
A lamp for those without light
A place of refuge for those who lack shelter
And a servant to all in need.

–Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama
   

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A Romanian ProTV station on a massacre of Tibetan refugees by Chinese soldiers on Nangapa pass in the Himilayas on Sept. 30, 2006. See more coverage and get involved in the struggle to free Tibet at Students for a Free Tibet and Tibet Will Be Free.
   

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from his website
   

a prayerby His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso The Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet
   

Words of Truth
   

Honoring and Invoking the Great Compassion
of the Three Jewels; the Buddha, the Teachings,
and the Spiritual Community
   

O Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and disciples
of the past, present, and future:
Having remarkable qualities
Immeasurably vast as the ocean,
Who regard all helpless sentient beings
as your only child;
Please consider the truth of my anguished pleas.

Buddha’s full teachings dispel the pain of worldly
existence and self-oriented peace;
May they flourish, spreading prosperity and happiness throughout this spacious world.
O holders of the Dharma: scholars
and realized practitioners;
May your ten fold virtuous practice prevail.

Humble sentient beings, tormented
by sufferings without cease,
Completely suppressed by seemingly endless
and terribly intense, negative deeds,
May all their fears from unbearable war, famine,
and disease be pacified,
To freely breathe an ocean of happiness and well-being.
And particularly the pious people
of the Land of Snows who, through various means,
Are mercilessly destroyed by barbaric hordes
on the side of darkness,
Kindly let the power of your compassion arise,
To quickly stem the flow of blood and tears.

Those unrelentingly cruel ones, objects of compassion,
Maddened by delusion’s evils,
wantonly destroy themselves and others;
May they achieve the eye of wisdom,
knowing what must be done and undone,
And abide in the glory of friendship and love.

May this heartfelt wish of total freedom for all Tibet,
Which has been awaited for a long time,
be spontaneously fulfilled;
Please grant soon the good fortune to enjoy
The happy celebration of spiritual with temporal rule.

O protector Chenrezig, compassionately care for
Those who have undergone myriad hardships,
Completely sacrificing their most cherished lives,
bodies, and wealth,
For the sake of the teachings, practitioners,
people, and nation.

Thus, the protector Chenrezig made vast prayers
Before the Buddhas and Bodhisativas
To fully embrace the Land of Snows;
May the good results of these prayers now quickly appear.
By the profound interdependence of emptiness
and relative forms,
Together with the force of great compassion
in the Three Jewels and their Words of Truth,
And through the power
of the infallible law of actions and their fruits,
May this truthful prayer be unhindered
and quickly fulfilled.
   

This prayer, Words of Truth, was composed by His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet, on 29 September 1960 at his temporary headquarters in the Swarg Ashram at Dharamsala, Kangra District, Himachal State, India. This prayer for restoring peace, the Buddhist teachings, and the culture and self-determina-tion of the Tibetan people in their homeland was written after repeated requests by Tibetan government officials along with the unanimous consensus of the monastic and lay communities.
   

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If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
   

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Ko Un

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Born in 1933, Ko Un is a former Zen monk, a former prisoner, and a poet. Here we sample from, his web site:
   

Ko Un

   

There, on the page called “Ko Un on Ko Un“, he writes:

For instance, who today would contradict someone who insists that the death of codes brings life to a poem, as in the case of the different numbers on freight trains waiting in line at Daejeon Station, whose numbers are no longer a code but a poem.

It is in this context that I reject the recent trend of interpreting a poem as text. There is no such thing as a poem that can simply be seen as a text. No poem can stay on a desk or an Internet screen. Poems do not exist in material anthologies.

The universe and space, the imensities of time are the stage for poems. Even a very short love song or elegy is a poem of the universe. That explains why poems should faithfully fulfill their public obligations to the world.

On the page “Who is Ko Un?“, Robert Hass has written:

Ko Un is a remarkable poet and one of the heroes of human freedom in this half century, a religious poet who got tangled by accident in the terrible accidents of modern history. But he is somebody who has been equal to the task, a feat rare among human beings.

On the “Chronology” page, after a section on Ko Un’s former lives, we find this for the year 1942:

By the time he was eight, he had already studied classical Chinese texts that even much older children usually had difficulty in mastering. In 1942 when he was in grade three, his Japanese headmaster asked him what he hoped to become in the future and got the answer, ‘The Emperor of Japan.’ Ko Un was severely punished for this effrontery.

And this for the year 1952:

Before the war was over, in 1952, he joined the Buddhist clergy and became the recognized disciple of the great monk Hyobong. For the next ten years he lived a life of Zen meditation, always on the move. He traveled the whole country, living by alms.

From his page “What They Say About Ko Un“, we are linked here to discover three of his poems:
   

Words Without Borders: Ko Un

   

and find a link to this, copied from Korean Culture Magazine from Spring 1999 (click to enlarge):

   

and this, copied from The Washington Post’s “Poet’s Choice” of January 4, 1998; which contains the poem “The woman from Sonjae” by Ko Un, translated by Brother Anthony of Taiza and Young Moo-Kim, and with discussion by Robert Hass:

   

He has several more sections, but the one I especially want to note is “Works in Translation” where at each translated compilation’s page, there are poems that pop up with a click into windows that perfectly fit the poem on its nicely done background. For instance, from Beyond Self–108 Korean Zen Poems pops
   

“Echo“

   

and from Morning Dew pops
   

“Sunlight“

   

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Here are his most recent poetry volumes, translated into English:

Flowers of a Moment (2006)

   

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The Three Way Tavern: Selected Poems (2006)

   

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Ten Thousand Lives (2005)

   

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